American philosophy: an attempt of identification through the category "market"

The article deals with the specifics of the spiritual life of America through the introduced category "market". An attempt is made to define the notion "American philosophy" through the discovery of common features of Ralph Emerson's transcendentalism, pragmatists, neo-realists, naturalists, and analytical philosophers. One of the most important factors that influenced the formation of American culture in general and philosophy in particular is the market - a special form of transactions and contracts. There also appeared a special kind of discourse, which the Russian researcher T. Venediktova designated as the "discourse of bargaining". As a form of communicative relations, this language practice has spread in all spheres of American socio-cultural life. Bargaining is not only an economic category, but also a communicative one; it involves the dynamism of the participants in communication, participation in bargaining can expand the horizon of one's "I", help learn more about oneself after learning that there is the other. The subject of this system constantly reassesses, overcomes the present state and any definition-restriction. Within the political process, representative democracy can be viewed as the exercise of political power in the process of exchange. It can be assumed that the dissemination of this discourse is wider, and its influence is stronger: the less the relations of people are predetermined and unchanged, the more important for them the freedom to choose their destiny, mutual circumspection and readiness for compromise are. Discourse of the market can serve as a model for an ideal "incessant dialogue", however, not the dialogue that implies the completeness of self-disclosure, attentive attitude to another individuality, but the kind of dialogue characterised by convertibility, substitution of truths, competitiveness, deception, manipulation, unpredictability. The author believes that American philosophy has a number of authors whose works can be interpreted through the "market" model as a special kind of an "incessant dialogue". Thus, Charles Sanders Pierce formulated the idea of a pragmatic approach consisting in identifying the meaning of the concept with its consequences, and his idea of fallibilism introduces the intersubjective agreement of the scientific community as a criterion of "intermediate truth". William James gave the pragmatic method of the all-encompassing region and established the "working capacity", the simplification and saving of the subject's efforts as a criterion of the truth of the idea. In the approach to explaining being, James uses the principles of pluralism and indeterminism: truth is not the result, the result of research, truth is an event, a process, its value and significance, and lies in the very process of its confirmation. In the works of John Dewey and George Herbert Meade the contextual characteristics of knowledge are actu-alised. Ideas, according to Dewey, are tools for practice, subject to improvement as new problematic situations arise. The communicative nature of culture and knowledge is especially evident in the concept of "solidarity as tolerance", of reaching an agreement based on an ironic attitude to opinions, values and beliefs, and on willingness to sacrifice them because of their non-absolute character. Thus, the ideal of a philosopher and philosophy is universal, but at the same time unique for every culture. The peculiarity of the American ideal that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is in the force field of market practices, political democracy and a developed system of mass communications lies in its proximity to the game model and the "market", which implies adversarial cooperation, consensus, tolerance, recognition of the involvement of all subjects of communication. This type of discourse is not exclusive in the culture of the United States and, of course, is inherent not only to it, but, replicating itself through the business, political, journalistic, literary and philosophical word, it has become one of the most important means of self-creation of the American nation as a cultural whole.

Keywords

Authors

References